WORK
The Mechanical Turk
Wolfgang von Kempelen's 1770 chess-playing automaton — revealed after decades to contain a human master — the historical ancestor of AI's anxiety, which has inverted: the modern system is not a fraud hiding a person inside but a genuine machine whose builders cannot explain what it does.
The Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton built in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin, and other prominent opponents across decades of exhibitions. The secret, revealed after the automaton's destruction in a fire in 1854, was that a human chess master was hidden inside the cabinet, operating the mechanism from within. The Turk became a touchstone for thinking about machine intelligence — a fraud that nonetheless revealed a genuine anxiety about whether a machine could be doing something humans cannot explain. Amodei invokes the Mechanical Turk to mark the inversion of that anxiety: the modern AI system is not a fraud with a human hidden inside; it is a genuine machine whose builders cannot fully explain what it is doing or why.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Turk operated for eighty-four years across multiple tours of Europe